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What is the Most Important Question in Ethics?
by Roger Crisp It’s often been said (including by Socrates) that the most important, ultimate, or fundamental question in ethics is: ‘How should one live?’.
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New issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics – Volume 10 Issue 1
We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 Issue 1 of the Journal of Practical Ethics, our open access journal on moral and political philosophy. You can read our complete open access archive online and hard copies will be available to be purchased at cost price shortly. Anderson, E. S., (2022) “Can We…
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Are We Heading Towards a Post-Responsibility Era? Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Morality
By Maximilian Kiener. First published on the Public Ethics Blog AI, Today and Tomorrow 77% of our electronic devices already use artificial intelligence (AI). By 2025, the global market of AI is estimated to grow to 60 billion US dollars. By 2030, AI may even boost global GDP by 15.7 trillion US dollars. And, at…
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Fracking and the Precautionary Principle
By Charles Foster Image> Leolynn11, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons The UK Government has lifted the prohibition on fracking. The risks associated with fracking have been much discussed. There is widespread agreement that earthquakes cannot be excluded. The precautionary principle springs immediately to mind. There are many iterations of this principle. The gist…
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Guest Post: Dear Robots, We Are Sorry
Written by Stephen Milford, PhD Institute for Biomedical Ethics, Basel University The rise of AI presents humanity with an interesting prospect: a companion species. Ever since our last hominid cousins went extinct from the island of Flores almost 12,000 years ago, homo Sapiens have been alone in the world.[i] AI, true AI, offers us the…
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Protecting Children or Policing Gender?
Laws on genital mutilation, gender affirmation and cosmetic genital surgery are at odds. The key criteria should be medical necessity and consent. By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) ———————- In Ohio, USA, lawmakers are currently considering the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act that would ban hormones or surgeries for minors who identify as transgender or non-binary. In April this year,…
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Reflective Equilibrium in a Turbulent Lake: AI Generated Art and The Future of Artists
by Anders Sandberg – Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford Is there a future for humans in art? Over the last few weeks the question has been loudly debated online, as machine learning did a surprise charge into making pictures. One image won a state art fair. But artists complain that the AI art…
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Guest Post: The Ethics of the Insulted—Salman Rushdie’s Case
Written by Hossein Dabbagh – Philosophy Tutor at Oxford University hossein.dabbagh@conted.ox.ac.uk We have the right, ceteris paribus, to ridicule a belief (its propositional content), i.e., harshly criticise it. If someone, despite all evidence, for instance, believes with certainty that no one can see him when he closes his eyes, we might be justified to…
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In Defense of Obfuscation
Written by Mette Leonard Høeg At the What’s the Point of Moral Philosophy congress held at the University of Oxford this summer, there was near-consensus among the gathered philosophers that clarity in moral philosophy and practical ethics is per definition good and obscurity necessarily bad. Michael J. Zimmerman explicitly praised clarity and accessibility in philosophical…
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The Moral Elephant in the Room – Patient Morality in Psychiatry
Cross-post from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog. By Doug McConnell, Matthew Broome, and Julian Savulescu. In our paper, “Making psychiatry moral again”, we aim to develop and justify a practical ethical guide for psychiatric involvement in patient moral growth. Ultimately we land on the view that psychiatrists should help patients express their own…